“There can be
No world of beauty,
No world of perfection,
No world of satisfaction,
Unless we go beyond the mind-horizons.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Our mind is the greatest obstacle in meditation. Every meditator faces this challenge: how to deal with the wandering, doubting, fearful, confused, resentful, outraged, insecure, arrogant mind with its parade of useless, destructive thoughts, worries, conspiracies, delusions, desires and distractions?
To claim and identify with our deeper self, our infinite heart and soul, we must learn to transcend the boundaries of our limited, finite self, in particular the limiting thoughts, beliefs and prejudices that constitute our perception of our mind.
Our biggest challenge in transcending the mind, is that our mind has captured our sense of identity. We think and act as though we are the mind, rather than we have the mind. So often when we say “I”, we are really referring not to our deeper, spiritual self but to our little, finite mind. We say, “I think this” and “I believe that” when really it is our mind which thinks and believes these things – and there’s a good chance it will think and believe something different tomorrow.
When we identify as our mind, we are attaching ourselves to a temporary unreality and pretending to be something we are not – something much weaker, smaller, fleeting, far less significant, beautiful and powerful than our real self.
We cannot hope to control the thoughts of our mind until we overcome the notion that we are our mind, for we cannot detach ourselves from our own identity.
Before launching into any method or means of controlling our thoughts, we must first learn to detach our conscious awareness from our mind. Repeat the mantra “I am not the mind, I am not the mind.”
[To be continued…]